It is no secret that our education system is in a death spiral. Many, if not most, students finish up a decade of public education without the necessary skills to succeed in college.

The Democrats’ solution has always been to spend even more money. If classrooms had more funding for the latest teaching gadgets or learning tools, they assert, students would succeed.

This idea has utterly failed.

According to the data, what has been successful is school choice. If parents are given the opportunity to move their children out of a failing school and/or move them to a school where teachers have the skills to help their children at a more specific level, then those children succeed.

School choice has always had its dissenters. They worry that it will destroy the education system and close public schools. Yet what the findings have actually proven, in study after study, is that school choice bolsters the public schools by instilling competition. Just as in a free-market economy, when schools compete against one another, the quality of education improves.

Families who participate in school choice are more likely to have children who graduate from high school. In Ohio, researchers found that the state’s private school voucher program boosted not only high school graduation but also college graduation.

This seems like a win all around. Parents are in control of their children’s educational needs, students are successful, and public schools are rising to the challenge by becoming better places of learning.

More money was never what was needed for educational scores to improve. Sound educational practice is.

For example, Sweden is reintegrating books into the classroom, along with pen and paper. This not only combats AI cheating, but it also builds a body-mind connection that screens do not. The Swedes noticed that extended screen exposure left students more distracted, less able to read challenging books meaningfully, and less able to develop important skills such as sustained attention, handwriting, and writing well.

Perhaps that is the next big step forward (or backward, ironically) for schools here in the U.S. If more states allow school choice, and if more schools return to physical textbooks and pen and paper, and even ban cellphones, our students might be a force to be reckoned with.

The Daily Wire’s Keri Ingraham ponders whether lawmakers are going to be brave and stand for what is working, or whether they will continue bowing down to the teachers unions, which do not actually care for the welfare of our children. That is an excellent question, to which I would add: Will schools stop encouraging teachers to be activists in the classroom?

Education is a privilege that many people around the world are denied. The U.S. has declared education a right and created public schools to ensure that each child receives an education. However, if children are put in schools only to come out the other end with a third-grade reading level, no understanding of math or science, and only a tentative grasp of how to write, then that is not fulfilling the promise to teach our kids.

However, with more studies and more tangible changes happening across the country and around the world, we can hope that good things are on the horizon. Perhaps in a decade, those man-on-the-street interviews won’t be as painful to watch.